271–280 of 294 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh for fuck's sake the 360 was a PowerPC arch, and the new Xbox is x86. This is so dumb. You know how PS3 used to support old games? It had the old Emotion Engine (PS2 cpu) built directly into their system--it was a turducken of processing. "wah wah wah i cant run my games from a different processor architecture wah wah wah" this is dumb anyone thinking this is dumb EDIT: Less insulting.
> EDIT: Less insulting. I can't even imagine what this looked like before the edit.
The real misstep here is that Microsoft is still selling physical media. Nobody (well, almost nobody) gets mad when they can't resell their iPhone games or mp3s or Kindle books; compare that to the outpouring of anger when a company puts limitations on used optical media games or CDs or books. Humans are wired to see a physical item (disks, etc.) and think mine .
Like in the pastebin, you can say it's the same for Steam and you would be right. However in 36 years, I will still have backups, or some competitors will still be in business (Amazon, GOG or any competitor) so I will always be able to find a way to buy it (or even download it on a website like http://www.myabandonware.com/ ).
Also when I buy a game, I always expect to be able to get at least the resell value on it, if needed. It's not possible on a digital market so when I buy it I expect it to cost less. Which is also not the case.
EDIT: Don't you love to be able to read books much older than you? Don't you would love to know that in 100 years, XboxOne game would still be playable?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way any of this will reasonably apply if we stick to this seven year cycle. By 2020, this will all be so obsolete, nobody will care about backward compatibility. Do you care that your PS4 is backward compatible with an abacus?
I was just playing a steam games from 2004... in fact i have games from the 90s on steam. And they still work almost perfectly, on any windows computer. So personally, I imagine there are plenty of people who care about it.
Accessible computing power is growing much faster than it has been in the last few decades thanks to networking. In just a few seconds, I can start as many cloud servers as I want and stream data directly to myself. I can easily run emulators of every past or present video game console right now on a phone. Sony is vocal about moving their infrastructure to the cloud as well.
This next generation is running on traditional AMD processors, and by 2020, I'm sure that emulating the correct environment for their software will not be a problem. Whether you stream your data from Sony or yourself, accessing it and your games will not be a problem. The console itself will eventually be just a DRM device to get you to the servers. The power or compatibility of the machine means very little in that case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that the One isn't backwards compatible with any of the 360 games I already bought and are stored in the cloud, which leads me to believe they'll do the same with the Two.
Oh for fuck's sake the 360 was a PowerPC arch, and the new Xbox is x86. This is so dumb. You know how PS3 used to support old games? It had the old Emotion Engine (PS2 cpu) built directly into their system--it was a turducken of processing. "wah wah wah i cant run my games from a different processor architecture wah wah wah" this is dumb anyone thinking this is dumb EDIT: Less insulting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way any of this will reasonably apply if we stick to this seven year cycle. By 2020, this will all be so obsolete, nobody will care about backward compatibility. Do you care that your PS4 is backward compatible with an abacus?
People like you have accepted the fact that they don't own anything they buy. If you are happy to buy a game today, and not being able to play it in a few years because the editor/console manufacturer have decided so, then good for you. On my side, I just want to enjoy what I bought, for as long as I can, and in 2020, I will for sure play 2013 games.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very good point, and explains why gamers care more about reselling Xbox games more than they care about reselling Steam games.
I would disagree. Most people get upset if they can't resell a $60 game. Few people get upset if they can't resell a $5 game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much of the first world is better connected than the US. If you're talking about gamers with both money and poor connections, they're far more likely to be in the US than anywhere else.
South Africa and many countries in Latin America can afford to pay $400 for the console. But they certainly can't count on a >1.5mb/s reliable internet connection. So yeah, MS screwed the pooch on this one and that will now all be Sony territory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't really work. The game is still supposed to be $60 at launch, that's when games make the most money, they really are worth that much (and more) as evidenced by the many people who pay that much for them, even on DRM-laden platforms like Steam. The point is to let the price fall faster after launch. Xbox can't exactly promise "Our games' prices will fall faster than the other guys" because the market will…
Did you read the link? The point is that they AREN'T really worth that much. My brother buys his xbox games (I stick with PC/Steam mostly) from gamestop and trades them in within a week or two if the multiplayer isn't exciting. So, to him, a game is NOT worth 60 bucks. The 60 dollar price point has nothing to do with him. He pays between 30 and 40 max, usually only playing B rated single player games years after the…
Anyways, long story short, it's really hard to price discriminate in typical markets, because it's both really hard to figure out which of your customers will pay full price, and it's really hard to stop the people who get discounts from reselling to the full price folks.
But, if your market is digital, flash-in-the-pan pop culture items, then you have a market that's pretty much tailor-made for price discrimination. Who will pay $60 for a game? Well, the ones who buy it on launch, or pre-order for nominal bonuses. How do you stop the the people who buy at a discount from selling to those who pay full price? Two ways -- you attach the game via DRM to an account that is inconvenient to transfer, and you only sell the discounted copies 2 years later. Sales are also a good way to do this -- many people who buy games in sales either were waiting for a sale because the price was too expensive, or heard about the game because of the sale and wouldn't have bought the game otherwise.
The current status quo is that all the profit from the $30 customers is going to GameStop. Microsoft would rather it go to themselves and their developers, so they would rather have digital downloads. Not so they can stop games from being sold at $30, just so that they can sell games themselves at that price without killing their market.